Litigation & Dispute Resolution

Our first focus is to help our clients avoid disputes wherever possible and to minimise risk. However, when necessary we resolve disputes efficiently and effectively through mediation, arbitration, adjudication, and litigation.

Litigation & Dispute Resolution is primarily about dispute avoidance - understanding our clients' business objectives and helping them to pre-empt potential problems and minimise future risk. However, disputes do arise and when they do we employ a variety of strategies to resolve them efficiently - mediation and arbitration as well as litigation.

Our Litigation & Dispute Resolution practice is one of the largest in the world, supporting existing clients and attracting new clients through its reputation for delivering results. Our teams consist of lawyers, advocates and negotiators - all essential to the successful running of client issues. The practice is divided into groups linked to particular types of work:

• Finance, corporate and regulatory

• International commercial arbitration

• Insurance

• Insolvency

• Intellectual property

Litigation & Dispute Resolution also has a forensic group of accountants and economists who assist the assessment of damages and asset tracing.

Typical work

Even for our largest, most successful clients, things don't always go as planned. Focusing on their business objectives, our work in this area is about dispute avoidance and minimising future risk.

Our work includes:

• Advising corporate clients, banks and financial institutions in commercial and financial disputes

• Investigating regulatory issues for financial institutions, for example into potentially fraudulent activitiess

• Handling defamation claims and advising on product liability, environmental liability and information technology issues

• Conducting arbitrations to resolve international commercial disputes

• Insurance-related litigation and also non-insurance related advisory work

• Insolvency litigation (closely related to our insolvency finance practice), involving, for example, voluntary arrangements, winding-up of companies, debt recovery and other contentious issues

• Litigation procedures for infringement of copyright, patents, trademarks, [remove - passing off], registered designs and databases as well as counterfeiting work and internet domain name protection

Notable cases

A New York Securities Litigation team won an important victory for AllianceBernstein (formerly Alliance Capital). The decision is notable not only because our team won a summary judgment dismissing a $1 billion claim, but also because the court ordered the plaintiffs' attorneys to pay Alliance's legal fees. This was the last in a series of claims and regulatory proceedings Alliance faced following the collapse of Enron. When Alliance first engaged Clifford Chance on these matters, it faced several billion dollars of potential Enron exposure. Since then, our team has helped Alliance win complete vindication in every forum. Alliance has paid no damages, settlement, or fines and has now twice been awarded attorneys fees.

A London litigation team defended JP Morgan Chase against a robustly argued claim in the High Court in London. The claim totalled nearly $1bn and related to a decade-long sales relationship in which our client sold emerging market debt securities to its customer. When the value of the customer's portfolio fell in 1998, the customer brought a range of misselling claims, alleging that JP Morgan Chase had failed to advise it properly, particularly in relation to Russian debt instruments. After a trial that lasted 68 days, the High Court rejected all of the customer's misselling claims. The judgment is an important victory for the client and more generally for the London banking community, as it provides a timely precedent for misselling claims which will be read with interest by many of our clients.

An L&DR team in Madrid represented Endesa, the major supplier of electrical power in Spain, in its fight against a EUR 22billion hostile takeover bid by Gas Natural, Spain's leading supplier of natural gas. This has been one of the most contentious and highly-publicized court disputes in Spanish history. Courts in Barcelona and Madrid ruled in favor of Endesa on two key injunction motions. These are landmark legal rulings, as the Barcelona decision is the first instance in which a Spanish court has interpreted the requirements of the passivity rule, which potentially restricts corporate action by a target company, within the context of an actual disputed takeover. The Madrid decision marks the first time a European Court has halted a takeover based on competition law. Both cases presented questions of first impression and the prevailing arguments were developed by Clifford Chance without the benefit of existing precedent.

Accolades and Awards

• Litigation and Regulatory Team of the Year (British Legal Awards 2007 sponsored by Legal Week)

What you might do

A trainee's role in this practice area is likely to be both varied and interesting. Whichever group you join within the practice, you will almost certainly be asked to carry out some form of case law and legislation research. You'll also be expected to take responsibility for document review, drafting and management - preparing document bundles for court, for example.

You might find yourself at meetings with clients and/or Counsel, helping to formulate arguments, or drafting witness and case statements or expert reports. You could be lucky enough to attend a case management conference, trial or mediation.

If possible you will be encouraged to attend court at some point during this seat, if only to observe the proceedings. You will definitely gain a greater awareness of the workings of the court system, the lawyer-barrister relationship and the inner workings of large corporate organisations. This is one of the most prolific departments for pro bono work, so you are also likely to be exposed to - or involved in - advocacy cases for charities or even representation of death row inmates. We have established close links with Liberty (human rights) and Law for All (broadening access to legal representation) and many of our trainees take up secondments to these organisations as part of their contentious experience.

There is also the possibility of being involved with cases that require working abroad for a short time.